The City Veins

So yesterday Aaron and I went to see Bloc Party at Constitution Hall, since both of us were too lame to see them at Black Cat or 9:30 the last time they came around. It was nice to see Kele (the lead singer) on the same stage where Aaron and Charles and I all graduated high school 9 years ago. The band stormed through their small catalogue of songs and truly amazed me with their reconstruction of their somewhat overly produced latest album, A Weekend in the City. Russell Lissack, the withdrawn heroin abused-looking guitarist, was fucking amazing. I’ve never seen anyone put so many seemingly lame 80s effects and phasers to such powerful and precise use. They played for a pretty long set, leaving nothing untouched–including the crowd, when the singer jumped into the sea of people towards the end of the night. It’s not hard to see why this band has been heralded for their live performances. Grinding it out on the road has obviously paid off and it’s good to see a band who cares about building a fanbase before selling records succeeding. The original opening band, The Maccabees, was dealing with visa issues, so we got to hear a few songs by Annuals beforethe Noisettes came on for 45 minutes and annoyingly shrieked and jumped around in obnoxious outfits. Their drummer is their saving grace, he looks like grizzley adams on acid. Some people liked them but I had already seen them open for TV on the Radio a few weeks ago and definitely did not need to hear them or TV on the Radio again. (Sorry, Charles and Aaron…and sorry for any future comments about Stevie Wonder also sucking.)

On to CityVeins news….Aaron and I recorded a pretty solid song yesterday, most of the music, minus vocals. From start to finish we worked for about 2 hours laying down four guitar tracks and backing vocals along with song arrangement. We’ll probably do the bass and lead vocals today and continue working this week on songs that are currently in our head or on my computer’s sound recording device. For anyone who actually cares, we used Aaron’s Rickenbacker for the rhythm guitar, and the Fender Telesonic for the lead parts. Aaron layered my Taylor acoustic underneath for some percussive background chords to give the song some body. The result is a very cool songs, with nods to Bowie, Radiohead, Wilco, Buckley, and I guess Pearl Jam….lots of noise but also some pretty nice melodies.

Tarr started writing lyrics to Oh, Backwards since he is now admitting to growing tired of making up lyrics to three of our songs when we play live. I reminded him that the other two songs have had finished lyrics for a month or so. Now the fun task of memorizing them. We have a bunch more demos to work through so it should be a busy week/weekend/summer. Aaron’s last day of work is today and mine is in two weeks then we have a full summer of music, sleeping, relaxing, and whatever else we fill our day with. Probably a lot of it will consist of watching Behind the Music and Classic Albums episodes, wondering why Bono is such an ass and why anyone likes the Grateful Dead.

This is probably the most boring blog post yet, but I was totally bored myself and figured I’d update the internet with our latest happenings. We’re playing at Chief Ike’s in Adams Morgan this Thursday with First Rays (www.firstrays.net) and Prabir and the Substitutes (www.prabirandthesubstitutes.com) . Come check us out.